Especially in the beverage industry, packs of one or several beverage articles are often order-picked in a customer-specific way on a pallet. To this end, groups of packs, particularly pallets, must be depalletized and the packs must be supplied to a pack storing device. Thereupon the packs stored in the pack storing device can be used for sequencing and palletizing, e.g. for order-picking, based on a customer order.
Starting from groups of packs, particularly pallets, the pack storing device is normally loaded automatically. However, the automatic loading of the pack storing device requires great efforts both in terms of the necessary mechanical installations and in terms of costs caused by system control as well as data and stock management of the packs. For instance, the costs for automatically loading a pack storing device can amount to more than 30% of the total costs for an automatic order-picking system.